In the field of telecommunications, it is common for different classes of network traffic to exist. Network traffic is classified by a variety of means. A common example is traffic belonging to a particular subscriber to the network. Subscribers are grouped into different classifications for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the level of service purchased (minutes, bandwidth, features etc), their location/geography, the type of handset/user equipment (UE) utilized, the business or enterprise to which they belong, or the network segment/server or point-of-interconnect to which they are assigned/attached.
Different nodes in the network may have lesser or greater (or even completely different) knowledge about these classifications. Generally, it is incumbent upon the network provider to manually manage the subscriber classification definitions on each node to ensure that a subscriber's traffic flow receives common treatment regardless of which node it traverses. For example, network operators may be required to pre-configure (static) data to define these groups and allocate subscribers to these groups, thus incurring an Operations, Administration, and Management (OA&M) cost to set up a subscriber and again each time a service or subscriber changes.
In addition, classifications/grouping constructs within a network node's data model typically have a fixed meaning (as determined by the equipment vendor's software), and may not match the network operator's view of how it classifies subscribers or defines services. As a result, equipment vendors either develop custom software for network operators, or the network operator compromises its desired classification schema (in terms of costs, efficiencies, or quality of service delivered).
Also, classification/grouping data models are frequently flat or hierarchical, which can make it difficult to have subscribers belong to multiple classifications simultaneously. In a network that includes software from multiple vendors (e.g., a mixed vendor network), data models between nodes are frequently different. Thus, a network operator may have difficulty defining a consistent classification and service view for a given subscriber or service across all the equipment through which the subscriber's service is delivered.